The Costs of War

For all the acres of newsprint devoted to the Iraq war, very little has focused on the reality of the war itself, that is to say, the human cost of the vast tidal wave of violence that was unleashed by the US-led invasion; a wave that courses through the towns and cities of Iraq, with ever-growing ferocity, to this day. See for example, the attempt made by Western politicians and media to marginalise or rubbish the most reliable study yet made into Iraqi civilian deaths caused by the invasion - which estimated a total of over 655,000. These too are, to use the current phrase, 'inconvenient truths'.

Coverage of the violence itself (as opposed to discussion of the politics of the war - which is endless) mostly focuses on the suicide bombings carried out by the Iraqi al Qaeda franchise. But as the abovementioned study pointed out, far more deaths (where there is an identifiable cause) are attributable to coalition violence. Over the last four-years-and-counting we have heard precious little of these deaths - those for which we are most directly responsible - though they take place just the same.

So a new collection of interviews with US veterans of the conflict, published in The Nation, provides a welcome corrective. The Independent comments that:

"It is an axiom of American political life that the actions of the US military are beyond criticism. Democrats and Republicans praise the men and women in uniform at every turn. Apart from the odd bad apple at Abu Ghraib, the US military in Iraq is deemed to be doing a heroic job under trying circumstances.

That perception will take a severe knock today with the publication in The Nation magazine of a series of in-depth interviews with 50 combat veterans of the Iraq war from across the US. In the interviews, veterans have described acts of violence in which US forces have abused or killed Iraqi men, women and children with impunity.

The report steers clear of widely reported atrocities, such as the massacre in Haditha in 2005, but instead unearths a pattern of human rights abuses. "It's not individual atrocity," Specialist Garett Reppenhagen, a sniper from the 263rd Armour Battalion, said. "It's the fact that the entire war is an atrocity."

A number of the troops have returned home bearing mental and physical scars from fighting a war in an environment in which the insurgents are supported by the population. Many of those interviewed have come to oppose the US military presence in Iraq, joining the groundswell of public opinion across the US that views the war as futile.

Journalists and human rights groups have published numerous reports drawing attention to the killing of Iraqi civilians by US forces. The Nation's investigation presents for the first time named military witnesses who back those assertions. Some participated themselves."

Some of these accounts of atrocities will be very difficult to read. But those of us whose governments started the war in which these events took place have little right to the comfort of ignorance. Its hard not to conclude that if everyone in the US and the UK was brought face to face with the reality described by these soldiers then the occupation would end tomorrow.

The testimonies include the following:

"I'll tell you the point where I really turned... [there was] this little, you know, pudgy little two-year-old child with the cute little pudgy legs and she has a bullet through her leg... An IED [improvised explosive device] went off, the gun-happy soldiers just started shooting anywhere and the baby got hit. And this baby looked at me... like asking me why. You know, 'Why do I have a bullet in my leg?'... I was just like, 'This is, this is it. This is ridiculous'."
Specialist Michael Harmon, 24, of Brooklyn, 167th Armour Regiment, 4th Infantry Division. In Al-Rashidiya on 13-month tour beginning in April 2003

"Here's some guy, some 14-year-old kid with an AK47, decides he's going to start shooting at this convoy. It was the most obscene thing you've ever seen. Every person got out and opened fire on this kid. Using the biggest weapons we could find, we ripped him to shreds..."
- Sergeant Patrick Campbell, 29, of Camarillo, California, 256th Infantry Brigade. In Abu Gharth for 11 months beginning November 2004

"I guess while I was there, the general attitude was, 'A dead Iraqi is just another dead Iraqi... You know, so what?'... [Only when we got home] in... meeting other veterans, it seems like the guilt really takes place, takes root, then."
- Specialist Jeff Englehart, 26, of Grand Junction, Colorado, 3rd Brigade, 1st Infantry. In Baquba for a year beginning February 2004

"[The photo] was very graphic... They open the body bags of these prisoners that were shot in the head and [one soldier has] got a spoon. He's reaching in to scoop out some of his brain, looking at the camera and smiling."
- Specialist Aidan Delgado, 25, of Sarasota, Florida, 320th Military Police Company. Deployed to Talil air base for one year beginning April 2003

"A lot of guys really supported that whole concept that if they don't speak English and they have darker skin, they're not as human as us, so we can do what we want."
- Specialist Josh Middleton, 23, of New York City, 2nd Battalion, 82nd Airborne Division. Four-month tour in Baghdad and Mosul beginning December 2004

"I felt like there was this enormous reduction in my compassion for people. The only thing that wound up mattering is myself and the guys that I was with, and everybody else be damned."
- Sergeant Ben Flanders, 28, National Guardsman from Concord, New Hampshire, 172nd Mountain Infantry. In Balad for 11 months beginning March 2004

You can read the full Nation article here.

Whilst the Iraqis are clearly the primary victims, reading the article brings home the inescapable fact that many if not most of the US troops are victims of the war as well, at one level or another. As well as killing and destroying, war also dehumanises, as Sergeant Flanders, quoted above, testifies. Moreover, long after they have gone home, the experiences of these men and women will continue to unpick the seams that would otherwise hold them together emotionally and psychologically. Inevitably these veterans - including those guilty of the worst atrocities - will bear the scars of their experiences for years to come. For many, this will mean the breakdown of their lives, their families, their health and their careers.

And while these multifarious breakdowns occur, the veterans will not necessarily be able to rely on the support of the state that sent them to war in the first place (which is true of British servicepeople as well). This makes rather a grim mockery of the "support the troops" refrain so beloved of politicians whose cynicism appears to extend to using those troops as collatoral for emotional blackmail in order to shut down debate on the wars those men and women have been sent to fight and possibly to die in.

The gory reality of war is not a new revelation. Rather, it is something that those who control the flow of information in our societies would rather we ignored or forgot. But the reality remains, and remains a reality that, via our votes, our taxes and above all our acquiescence, we are ourselves complicit in. With any luck these testimonies will serve not only as a reminder of this, but also as a spur to greater action aimed at ending the status of aggressive war as a favoured foreign policy tool of government.

Welcome to the 21st century, Mr. Cheney

Juan Cole right on the money, as is so often the case, describes here two 21st centuries: the actual 21st century and the one in Dick Cheney's mind.

"I caught a clip of Dick Cheney on Sunday saying that "in the 21st century," the US could stay in Iraq and ensure that a stable government was established that could defend itself.

I was struck by his invocation of the 21st century, as though it were automatically on the side of the US, or more especially on the side of American hawks.

The Project for a New American Century was always a project for a new American empire, an empire of the old rickety nineteenth-century sort. Its time passed a long time ago. Peoples of the global south don't have to surrender their independence to European district commissioners anymore. They have enough biopower to forestall that fate. "

read the rest here.

Also today, in the Guardian, Jackie Ashley launches a powerful attack on the rest of the political class for focusing on trivialities like the career of Defence Secretary Des Browne and marginalising discussion of the ongoing carnage in Iraq:

"What matters is the disaster. What matters is the blood dripping into the sand, day after day, week after week. What matters is the obvious thing, the hideous civil war destroying Iraq, and the murders and the bombings, and our complicity in that....We have made this situation, rolled out the pitch on which civil war and terrorism are being played out, and have failed to find any way of binding the wounds we opened. The answers are hard, expensive, and possibly humiliating - they certainly involve dialogue with the Iranians. But that's what the Commons should be debating today, not Des Browne and his stupid inquiry."

I'd make a couple of points on Ashley's article.

Firstly, she praises the elements of the web-based non-mainstream media that have focused on what matters in respect of Iraq and mentions two sites: Iraq Coalition Casualty Count and Iraq Body Count. Of these, she says that the former "confines itself to collating news reports and is therefore, it says itself, undercounting", which is also true of Iraq Body Count, but she neglects to mention that. This is important because she cites the IBC death toll of "between 61,391 and 67,364" whereas the most reliable estimate is probably that published in the Lancet medical journal [pdf] last year which cited a figure of 655,000. The Lancet report, whilst rubbished in public by the government, was privately admitted to have come "close to best practice", using "robust", "tried and tested" methodology which may even have lead to an underestimate according to one adviser.

Secondly, while Ashley characterises the conflict as a civil war, the Lancet report noted that a large proportion of the deaths, in fact most of those whose cause was identifiable, came as a result of coalition air strikes. Plainly the nature of the conflict has changed over the years, but coalition air power is still very much active today, so the meaningful focus that Ashley calls for would have to look at this element as well.

But credit to Ashley for making two compelling and important points that need to be made far more often in mainstream discourse: firstly, that Iraq is first and foremost a tragedy for the Iraqi population (as opposed to a disaster for Western prestige, Tony Blair's legacy or some such triviality) and secondly, for acknowledging that the US-UK share a large part of the responsibility for the sectarian element of the conflict.

Iraq's silent bombers

Over at Tomdispatch (a site I can’t recommend highly enough), Nick Turse presents one of the most important pieces of writing about the Iraq war I’ve seen in a long while; an in-depth analysis of the ongoing use of coalition air power.

According to a mortality survey conducted by the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University, 13% of Iraqi deaths with an identifiable cause since the 2003 invasion were due to coalition air-strikes, which according to the survey’s results would equal around 78,000 deaths up to June last year.

Recall that in a counterinsurgency war, the coalition is not fighting an enemy spread out and exposed on an open battlefield and far from any population centres. It is fighting an enemy that resides within and indeed grows out of those population centres. With that in mind, the sheer tonnage of ordinance rained down on Iraqi cities, towns and villages, as described by Turse, is startling. For example, according to figures released by US Central Command, in 2006, 162 500-pound bombs and fifteen 2000-pound bombs were dropped on Iraqi targets.

These attacks are increasing, as snipers and roadside bombs drive the US out of the streets of Iraq and into the skies. In Asia Times, Pepe Escobar reports that the doomed US-led “surge” offers “the dire prospect … of a devastating air war over Baghdad …. as counterinsurgency fails”. Turse points out that the escalation of the air war may already be underway:

“For example, on January 9th, the U.S. unleashed its air power on Baghdad's Haifa Street, a "mostly Sunni Arab enclave of residential buildings and shops." According to the Washington Post, "F-15 fighter jets strafed rooftops with cannons, while the Apache[ helicopter]s fired Hellfire missiles." Elsewhere in Iraq that day, according to Air Force reports, F-16s strafed targets near Bayji with cannon fire, while others dropped GBU-38s on targets near Turki Village; and F-15Es provided "close-air support" to troops near Basrah.”

“That same evening, back in the U.S., a broadcast of Fox News Channel's "Special Report with Brit Hume" offered a brief glimpse of the air war in a story by reporter David Macdougall who was, said Hume, "embedded with the Air Force in a location we cannot identify, where not only fighter jets, but bombers roared into the air headed for other targets in Iraq." Macdougall reported that the B-1B Lancer, the long-range bomber that carries the largest payload of weapons in the Air Force was, for the first time in over a year, again being employed in combat in Iraq.”

"These B-1 bombers were central to the raid. We're told they flew a ten-hour mission, and by the looks of their empty bomb bays, these planes dropped thousands of pounds of munitions. They bombed 25 targets deep inside Iraq,"”

For those of us in Britain, focusing on the involvement of our own forces is of yet more importance than focusing on the conduct of our principle ally. So its worth noting that, for example, Royal Air Force Tornado jets provided cover for the US Air Force in what is increasingly looking like a massacre of Iraqi tribesmen in Najaf last month. Whilst the precise nature of these events remain unclear, what is clear is the large proportion of Iraqi deaths caused by ongoing coalition air strikes, the ongoing use of air power, and its necessarily indiscriminate nature. Of course it should also be noted that all this occurs within the context of, and in defence of, a foreign occupation of Iraq which the population itself explicitly rejects.

And yet, despite both its ongoing use and substantial human cost, you will struggle to find any media reporting specifically on the use of coalition air power. It is, in effect, a story within the Iraq war that has been not so much forgotten as ignored altogether (though admittedly not by Iraqis, who don’t enjoy that luxury). What Turse reports is more or less the sum total of what little is known about the use of US air power, and I’m certainly not aware of any major reporting into the current role of the RAF, though apparently it does have some involvement. To appreciate the gravity of this, its sufficient to imagine any violent offensive carried out by Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas or al-Qaeda that left an estimated 78,000 people dead over 3 years and yet received effectively no western media coverage.

So I have a suggestion: get in touch with the editor of your newspaper or TV news programme of choice and politely ask them the following questions:

1. Are you aware that, according to research done by the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University, coalition air strikes have caused 13% of Iraqi casualties since March 2003?

2. Are you aware that the use of coalition air power is both ongoing and appears to be increasing as part of the US-led military “surge”?

3. What reports have you carried recently that focus on the use of coalition air power in Iraq and its effects on civilians?

4. Specifically, what reports have you carried on the involvement of the RAF?